"You shall have the tallest, the prettiest I can find," says Kit from the doorway, where she stands framed unknowingly, looking such a slender, ethereal creature, with eyes too large for her small face, that Monica, with a sudden pang of fear, goes swiftly up to her, and, pressing her to her heart, holds her so for a moment.
"I know what you are thinking now," says Kit, with another laugh,—"that I shall die early."
"Kit! Kit!"
"Yes. Isn't it strange? I can read most people's thoughts. But be happy about me. I look fragile, I know, but I shall not die until I am quite a respectable age. Not a hideous age, you will understand, but with my hair and my teeth intact. One keeps one's hair until forty, doesn't one?"
"I don't know. I'm not forty," says Monica. "But hurry, hurry out of the garden, because the dew is falling."
Down the dark staircase, through the darker halls, into the brilliant moonlight, goes Kit. The wind, soft as satin, plays about her pretty brows and nestles through her hair, rewarding itself thus for its enforced quiet of an hour ago. Revelling in the freedom she has gained, Kit enters the garden and looks lovingly around upon her companions,—the flowers.
Who would sleep when beauty such as this is flung broadcast upon the earth, waiting for man to feast his slothful eyes upon it?
Lingeringly, tenderly, Kit passes by each slumbering blossom, or gazes into each drowsy bell, until the moonlit patch of grass she had pointed out to Monica is at last reached. Here she stands in shadow, glancing with coy delight at the fairyland beyond. Then she plunges into it, and looks a veritable fairy herself, slim, and tall, and beautiful, and more than worthy of the wand she lacks.
Walking straight up her silver path, she goes to where the lilies grow, in a bed close by the hedge. But, before she comes to them, she notes in the hedge itself a wild convolvulus, and just a little beyond it a wild dog-rose, parent of all roses. She stays to pluck them, and then—
"Kit," says a voice subdued and low, but so distinct as to sound almost in her ear.